Future Sight Player's Guide

After a bunch of less than interesting player's guides, this one actually has some important information. Not much of it, so we'll go through it quickly, but this is defintely one for the "why did they bury that information in such an obscure source?" pile.

As always with these guides, there are a few pages discussing the themes and abilities of the set, and there is the always funny "ten coolest cards" list (this time the best bit is Quagnoth making the top 10, but Tarmogoyf missing out). In the theme's discussion there is a quick mention of Oriss as "the daughter of Orim and Cho-Manno". While Matt Cavotta's article on the subject left some room to doubt whether we should take his reference to "mama and papa" literally, this seems pretty definitive. If you're wondering how a "future" character can be the daughter of two people we last saw 300 years ago... we'll, there is plenty of magic in this setting. Plus, her dad was inexplicably invulnerable, so maybe she inherited some weird genetics? Or maybe she's from the past but just turned up too late for Time Spiral. Chances are we'll never actually meet her, so it's all academic anyway.

Another section we always get is a quick story summary that mostly just covers the last novel so you can understand the one you got in the same Fat Pack that these player's guides came in. This time it continues though, giving a quick summary of the whole history of the time rifts, as well as a summary of how they were all closed! That includes some pretty big spoilers, so I hope you read page 4 and 5 before the Future Sight novel, but pages 8 and 9 afterwards!

The history of the rifts bit is interesting, because here we finally get spelled out what Rei Nakazawa and Matt Cavotta meant with the rifts influencing other planes.

• On Mirrodin, the plane's mana core destabilized and discharged five separate orbs of mana (Mirrodin's "suns"). Moreover, the instability enabled Memnarch's delusions to partially substitute for the plane's reality, effectively shutting out Mirrodin's creator, Karn.
• On Kamigawa, the damage weakened the veil between the utsushiyo (material realm) and kakuriyo (spirit realm). This enabled the daimyo Konda and his moonfolk accomplices to use powerful magic to pull an aspect of O-Kagachi, the kami of all kami, through the veil, thus beginning the Kami War.
• On Ravnica, the plane became isolated from the rest of the multiverse, causing the spirits of the dead to linger and accumulate there, eventually resulting in the Ghost Quarter of Agyrem

The Kamigawa stuff we already heard about in the Time Spiral novel, when Nicol Bolas talked about the ringing of the Apocalypse Chime somehow reverberating though the Madaran rift to Kamigawa and weakening the intra-planar barrier there. That sounded a bit like Scott McGough, noted fan of the Sengir family, just putting in a fun reference though. And since that was specifically the Apocalypse Chime doing it, the link to what Rei and Matt said wasn't entirely clear. Their quick references could also be interpreted as if there were time rifts or mana depletion events going on on other planes, but here we definitively learn the effects of the rifts are very varied, spread out over a lot of time, and the background cause of the events from the last few blocks.

It's especially good to have some explanation, however vague, of what was happening on Mirrodin, and just how Memnarch was able to keep Karn out. Note though that it says nothing about time being warped! The storyline community grabbed on to this paragraph to explain the completely broken Mirrodin timeline though, and it eventually became canon in an even more obscure place than a Player's Guide: the fold-out insert that came with the From the Vault: Lore box!

What happened on Kamigawa is actually a bit more complicated than what is said here. As you can see, this text explicitly mentions the moonfolk aiding Konda. In the Kamigawa novels we learn they where actually working alongside Hisoka, on behalf of Mochi, the Kami of the Crescent Moon. The Kamigawa vignettes told us they also roped in Sensei Eight-and-a-Half-Tails, getting him to do some purely theoretical research into breaching the veil, which turned out to be not so theoretical afterwards. Time Spiral then added a link to the Homelands story via the Apocalypse Chime, and years later the War of the Spark Artbook further complicated things by saying it was actually the destruction of the time machine at Tolaria in Time Streams that influenced the veil backwards through time. It's all a bit esoteric though, so I guess the Chime and the time machine both weakened the veil together, enabling all those characters on Kamigawa to start fiddling with it.

The Ravnican bit is interesting because Dissension revealed Ravnica was locked away from the Multiverse before the Guildpact was signed. In fact, Ravnica being a closed system somehow was integral to getting the 'pact to work. The only rift we know of that is that old is the one at Madara, which would put the closure of Ravnica between -15.000ish AR (the creation of the rift) and -5500ish AR (the signing of the Guildpact). Since Mirrodin and Kamigawa felt the effects pretty much immediately, you'd think this event would be pretty close to that older date, but since the effects on all the planes are so different it may have taken a long time to manifest.

The history of the rifts mentioned above sticks to what people only familiar with the sets would know, and thus starts with the Brothers' War, omitting the Madaran rift. On the next page we get a list of rifts and how they were closed though, and this one does include all of them. 

It's a list that annoys me to no end though, by not being sorted chronologically by when the rifts were created, nor by when they were closed, nor in alphabetical order. I think it's sorted by the order in which they are mentioned (not shown!) over the course of the Time Spiral novels, but I'm not rereading everything to check. It's a terrible way of sorting things anyway!

Mostly it just recaps what we already know, keeping all the vagueries from the novels (Lord Windgrace is "perhaps metaphysically alive within Urborg" according to this text, whatever that means), but there is one very important line: 

"Karn was able to mend [the Tolarian rift] with the planeswalker spark passed on to him by Urza."

There are two bits of information here that were not clear in the actual stories; that Karn got his spark from Urza, and that he sacrificed it to close the rift.

Karn having Urza's spark is one of those well known Magic lore facts that is more difficult to find a source for than you might imagine. After his ascension we see him for barely a page in Apocalypse in which he just says stuff like "I am the sum of a legion of artifacts and souls", and that "I knew Gerrard. I still know him, and Urza too. Time is not for me what it is for you. I 'm talking with them just now". During his ascension itself there some equally oblique stuff referring to Glacian's soul and all of them merging somehow. That this meant Karn got Urza's spark was accepted as true by the fandom from that point on, but it's nice to have this player's guide finally clearly spelling it out.

Him losing the spark wasn't made explicit either. In Planar Chaos, while the gang is makings plans, he says he might lose his spark but would still be able to planeswalk because his mortal form would still "contain the legacy". Then when he's actually closing the rift he wonders if he'll still have enough strength to planeswalk afterwards, but doesn't think about losing it. The actual moment is somewhat unclear, since we see it from Venser's perspective. Karn tells him "I am almost through. It has not been easy, but-", before being cut off by the Phyrexian corruption. It seems like he was about to say things worked out in the end, and the fact that he planeswalks almost immediately afterwards ("flickering in and out of the Blink Eternities so that no one would ever be able to pick up his trail") suggests he still has his spark & powers. The Player's Guide describes that moment this way:

"In the moment after the rift was mended, Karn seemed to realize something terrible and flung himself into the Blind Eternities, the void between planes"

So, did he lose his spark there? And if he did, how could he still planeswalker away? Well... I guess it's time to talk about Karn's many possible sparks.

The text above established that Karn got his spark from Urza. What this leaves as an open question is where Urza got that spark from. Was it his own, or did he just have Glacian's thanks to the Might- and Weakstone? Or did he have both? This is something fans have been debating for ages. On the one hand, a close reading of  The Brothers' War shows Urza ascending before getting the Weakstone. On the other hand, in Apocalypse he talks about Glacian "empowering" him. Neither bit is explicit enough to close out all wiggle room for interpretation. In the depths of Phyrexia.com you can find people mentioning (in this FAQ for example) that Scott McGough confirmed Urza had his own spark in an even older, now lost, forum thread, and it seems clear that the original intention was for that to be the case, considering Glacian wasn't even thought up for the first few years of the Weatherlight Saga (not to mention the first references to Urza ascending all the way back during Antiquities), but I couldn't find any explicit confirmation.

This is relevant here, because it ties into the question: just how many sparks did Karn have? If he got both Urza's and Glacian's, we've got a simple explanation for how he could still planeswalk after losing one. The Player's Guide does say "the planeswalkers spark passed on to him by Urza", rather than "one of the..." or "Urza's spark", suggesting it was just the one. Perhaps that is reading too much into the text though, and a lot of people seem to have accepted that Karn had those two sparks.

The whole discussion is even more complicated though. In addition to the general vagueness of Apocalypse, we also have Planeshift talking about how Karn was becoming a god from regaining his memories, suggesting he was ascending without any transplanted sparks at all. Weirdly, the next book promptly forgot about that. Perhaps there is a much longer game of pass the spark going on here? In a more prosaic explanation, we have the Time Spiral trilogy repeatedly saying he just had some internal machinery that made him indistinguishable from regular 'walkers. So we actually have a potential four different ways for Karn to be a planeswalker! No wonder he could give up a spark without even commenting upon it!

With all that possible nonsense going on, the most simple thing to do is perhaps to just not bother with the discussion, and say it doesn't matter how many sparks Karn had, he sacrificed all of them to close the rift, and just used the last remaining bit of power within him to leave. This seems to match with how we see Karn in Scars block. We know the "enemy I created" jumps Karn moments after he closed the rift, and the next time we see him he has been corrupted by the glistening oil and is without a spark, so it does sound like a reasonable assumption that giving up the spark and becoming a mere mortal was what allowed the oil to start effecting him. 

That is perhaps the most elegant solution, though personally I don't feel it 100% works with the text of Planar Chaos. Karn seems too nonchalant before the corruption grabs him, and weaving a confusing path through the Multiverse to throw people of your trail doesn't sound like something you could do with the last bit of your power. The text is vague enough not to directly contradict that reading, but I prefer to embrace the "multiple sparks" theory and come up with a more complicated head-canon:

• Karn held multiple sparks, most likely Urza's and Glacian's, as obliquely referred to in Apocalypse, and partially confirmed in the Future Sight Player's Guide.
• He picked up the dormant oil during Scourge, like we heard in the Moons of Mirrodin prologue, but it wasn't powerful enough to influence an old-school planeswalker. 
• Karn gave up one of the sparks Urza passed to him to close the Tolarian rift, as confirmed in the Player's Guide, but still had a least one more afterwards, explaining his calmness in the Planar Chaos novel. Heck, he may not even have noticed one spark was gone!
• Then something in the past, perhaps something to do with Yagwmoth still being alive, Phyrexia not being exploded yet, or just the general abundance of Phyrexian war machines on Dominaria at that point, supercharges the oil and starts corrupting him. He flees to Mirrodin.
• But before he can do anything useful the Mending happens and he loses his godlike power just like all the other planeswalkers in the Multiverse. At that point the oil overpowers him and extinguished his remaining spark(s) (as the Phyrexians don't figure out how to make Phyrexianized planeswalkers until Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty), and he is captured by the New Phyrexians.

The bit about him getting the oil during Scourge contradicts a bunch of stuff we hear in the Scars of Mirrodin era, and perhaps there are more contradictions (I haven't gone through all the storyline sources of that time yet) but all those explanations come from articles, and when articles contradict the actual stories I prefer to go with the latter. The above might be a bit is ridiculously complicated, but it keeps the text of Moons of Mirrodin and Planar Chaos intact, and makes them make sense with the fact that Karn loses a spark according to the Player's Guide and has lost all sparks by the time of Scars block.

...and thart wraps up that discussion! Until we actually get to Scars block and Venser teleporting... well, you'll see.

My face when I think about Scars of Mirrodin's continuity issues.